Data Recovery: How To Hook Up A Hard Drive

Yesterday I received a call from a gentleman in Alaska. His daughter had built him a new computer and he needed to get his data from his old Windows 98 machine into his new Windows Vista environment. He had called me because my phone number is on our hard drive recovery blog.

He was there after searching for “how to hook up a hard disk” on Google and pulled up Jacqui Best’s post: Data Recovery Tutorial How To Slave A Hard Drive. He wanted to print it out so he had a reference while doing the slaving of the hard drive. Since that blog is on Blogger, printing a post isn’t the easiest thing to do and I ended up having him email the post to himself for easy printing.

While we were going through this I was getting the feeling that this project might be pushing his skill level. I asked him if he knew what a USB hard drive was, and proceeded to find out if he could get one where he was in Alaska. The goal here is to give him an easy way to hook his old hard disk drive to his new system. After looking around on the Internet, I decided to take care of it in a proactive manner and had him call our office. They took down his info and shipped him an external hard drive case.

Slave a Hard Drive For Data Recovery

Like I’ve said before, DTI is serious when it comes to customer service! There are quite a few legitimate data recovery companies in the US, by legitimate I mean they have a clean room and actually perform data recovery in-house and don’t farm the job out. Out of those companies DTI has one of the best track records for customer service. Proof in the pudding is Dick Correa’s post about SCO Unix RAID Data Recovery “Data Recovery A Partnership For Success” where he lays out the process of interaction between himself and a client.

I am responsible for checking out our competitors and I have never seen another data recovery company say anything even remotely like that!

Back to the post, here is an external hard drive that I like:

Maximum Versatility.
Masscool 3.5-inch SATA-IDE HDD Enclosure.
This phenomenal new Masscool UHB-340UPS portable SATA-IDE combo hard drive enclosure features true “take it with you anywhere” convenience and versatility. Need an IDE hard drive enclosure? No problem. Need an enclosure for your SATA drive? The Masscool SATA-IDE enclosure fills the bill. It’s the perfect fit for any 3.5-inch SATA or IDE hard drive. Cool and secure. Plus, the Masscool UHB-340UPS hard drive enclosure boasts all the lighting-fast connections with its USB 2.0 interface. Supports hot-plug as well as plug and play. For maximum utility and superb portability, order the Masscool UHB-340UPS hard drive enclosure.

Specifications

Enclosure Type

3.5″

Compatible Drives

3.5″ Hard Drives

Drive Interface

SATA IDE

Enclosure Interface

USB 2.0

USB 2.0 Transfer Rate

480 Mbps

Enclosure Material

Aluminum

Dimensions

23.0 x 13.1 x 3.7 cm

Features

Aluminum Enclosure

Suitable for 3.5″ IDE HDD or SATA HDD

Ultra Dissipation

Easy installation

Hot-Swappable Connection (Plug & Play)

With a case like this you can simply put the old hard drive in and hook it up through the USB port on your new machine and off you go! Our Data Recovery Software will also work on an external hard drive. Of course if you are looking to clone a hard drive then you must slave it, but for easy file recovery try an external hard disk drive case.

13 Responses to “Data Recovery: How To Hook Up A Hard Drive”

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I have 3 older computers that cannot be accessed for various reasons, but all have good hard drives with photos and logos that I would like to retrieve. Can I remove these HD’s and use a case or box to access the drive via USB cable? I have no idea about where to get something like this or even if it exists. Please comment.

I have a Compaq laptop w/ a 60GB Seagate AT drive. System files
have gotten corrupted and I can’t get past BSOD w/ error message
stop: c0000021a. I would like to slave this drive to get some data
files off it before I format it and reinstall the OS. The drive has a
slot connector sitting over the pins and no separate power connector.
Is there a special cable to connect this drive to a standard IDE
cable as a slave?

I have a virus on my computer, which has resulted in my inability to do anything other than look at a black or blue screen. No system restore, no safe mode, etc…Anyway….because I’m not always backing up files…I want to recover some files from my hard-drive. I will say that I have no idea how to slave the hard drive…though I did take it out, and tried to install in another computer…but thay have a different pin configuration. My laptop is a HP ZV6000. Can I take that hard drive,from the HP, and hook it up to some converter and connect through a USB (on the other and ) and connect to different computer to save my files?

I’m trying to connect a slave drive to my current computer. When I set the jumper to slave my computer does not detect the drive. However, when I set the jumper to master, my computer does detect it. How can I make my computer detect the drive as a slave?

80 gb Hitachi – IDE (HDS728080PLAT20) won’t spin up!
I had to shut down power to everything via the power strip – I know, not good! Anyway, now I cannot get my external HDD to spin up. It’s getting power – the green lights on the disk enclosure and power adapter cord box are on. Have tried gently shaking it. Also tried a different enclosure…no luck. I’m guessing bad PCB but hope I’m wrong as it’s hard to find an exact replacement. Someone mentioned hooking it up as a slave to a desktop. Any ideas?

okay, I can’t figure this out. Please help.
My old HP desktop running XP went out and was replaced with a new HP running Windows 7. I need some data from the ‘old’ (WD2500 Serial ATA) hard drive. I purchased a [ Deluxe USB to IDE Cable w/power adapter] to plug into and retrieve my files via USB. My HP with windows7 will only recognize it as a bridge and I can not pull anything up in Explore. So, I plugged it into a Toshiba laptop running Vista. On this computer it recognized the hard drive and was able to pull it up in Explore and see my files lised. I can even open word docs and other files that I had saved in various folders. My problem is that the files I need to access are saved in the HP-Administrator folder and those files will not open. I get messages that I do not have permission or that access is denied. How can I gain access to these files??? Please help.

I have an old computer that does not recognize now the maxter hard drive. When I turn the computer it gives this message: “verifying DMI Pool Data”. Later on shows: “Disk Boot Failure, Insert System Disk and press Enter”. I put the ‘start up disk windows 98. Then, I get the message: “Windows 98 has detected that drive C doe not contain a valid FAT or FAT 32 partition…I originally had windows 95 and I upgraded to windows ME. I need the computer to recognize the hard drive and after that to reinstall the operating sytem–Windows ME. I appreciate all the help given to this matter.